Look I love Biden. Biden's a good guy. Long record of stupid obvious lies. Has always been quite racist. just me or is it creepy the way he talks about Obama. Very inconsistent on abortion. bad on immigration. Supported genocide in Gaza, boosted false narratives to silence dissen
Ok before any academics caption this some sht like "🛥️my summer research plans / 🐳the fall semester" I want to remind you that it is EXTREMELY dangerous to allegorize a whale.
i find it creepy that people on here love pale fire by vladimir nabovok. do people not realize its complexly metatextual structure raises vexing narratological and epistemological questions?
The truly tortured poets, the real sickos, don't think stuff like "my bf reminds me of a tattooed golden retriever." They think stuff like "what if you were grieving and then there was a weird bird"
INTERVIEWER: explain this gap in your resume
WHITMAN: I was writing Leaves of Grass
INTERVIEWER: I mean after 1855
WHITMAN: writing Leaves of Grass (1856)
INTERVIEWER: ok but *after*
WHITMAN: Leaves of Grass (1860)
INTERVIEWER: let me guess...
WHITMAN: then I was a sexy nurse
Always fun to remember that when Hawthorne writes about how his office job totally killed his creativity and will to live he was talking about a 3.5 hour work day.
I’ve just learned that following the academic model, Joe Biden’s vacant position will be filled by a 1-year VAP (visiting assistant president). The pay is 35k and the candidate must relocate to rural Maine.
we must abolish the anthropocentrism of the “conference” in favor of more radical “assemblages” of nonhuman kin. However, they should still take place at a Marriott
CFP: Worlding Wordle
How does Wordle make worlds? How might we think utopian horizons disclosed by synesthetic forms— rhythms of color shape text? Is there a literature of wor(l)d(l)ing? An ecology? Send abstracts, CV, and your second fav starting word after penis by March 1
Please don’t laugh at the idea of academia being a calling. I have told many times the inspiring story of the holy spirit asking me to make overcomplicated moby-dick jokes for ~12 people online; it is entirely possible it asked someone else to be an anti-union professor at Yale.
I have been informed by the most humorless people in the world that possibly the decision was not made because of tweets, but that doesn't seem right to me because look at all the good tweets.
Incredible teaching moment today. Room absolutely surrounded by leaf blowers. Outside every window its own leaf blower. Student zooming in from 200miles away apologizes for noise on their end: it's leaf blowers. Leaf blower feedback loops. Regional variances in leaf blower timbre
@V21collective
[Walt Whitman tries to tell a joke]
A priest, rabbi, and minister walk into a bar,
sailor-men, merchant-men, walk into a bar,
Workmen and Workwomen! into a bar,
Blacksmiths with grimed and hairy chests, the carpenter dressing his plank, president and prostitute walk into a b
Happy Birthday, Herman Melville. You had some experiences and wrote about them but you didn't just do an autofiction you got some WHALE FACTS and did some METAPHORS and REFERENCES and also MARITIME SEXUAL INNUENDOS 👑
"oh harumph Melville didn't 'love' Hawthorne he didn't 'really' 'want' 'him' to 'drop' 'germinous' 'seeds' in him..." STOP. The erotic intensity of the relationship can't be known definitively but his writing is shot thru w/ it. The urgent q is how much did he really hate a fish
As children many Swedes watch the Muppets, but at some point learn that “Förvirrad Kock” (basically, confused / deranged cook) is “Swedish Chef” in English and it’s quite traumatic and makes them awkward about cooking for people. So imo a little empathy is in order.
@jray129
@Tyler_A_Harper
💯 I'm just mocking the current crop of essays and tweets that adopt a tone of reluctantly criticizing an aging saint (even though I get rhetorically why some are doing this)
mastodon sounds fine but me and my mushroom kin are connecting on a new social platform called THE UNIMAGINABLY VAST MYCORRHIZAL NETWORK PULSING BENEATH YOUR VERY FEET
Benedict Anderson theorized that a nation is as it were an imagined community forged through the simultaneity of being briefly annoyed by a very loud noise from our phones
To accommodate diff learning styles I give students choice. read 100 pgs of Moby-Dick a day. Or make an animal your nemesis. Latter is NOT the “easy” option. I wanna see wounds, abandoned family. I better hear you curse god in the Shakespearean cadences of a salty Quaker dialect
Pleased to announce I did a lightly awkward social faux pas at this conference so have added it to the store of things I’ll remember for the rest of my life.
Planning a graduate seminar on theory of work in long 19th-c. US lit, with eye on presentist resonance to anti- / post-work politics, great resignation, etc. Draft syllabus below — thoughts? hmu w/ your fav primary texts, history, criticism, philosophy, concepts...? Thanks!!
uhhh Melville was profoundly partisan. He was aggressively on the side of dramatizing the tensions between putatively popular sovereignty and racial / extractive capitalism through weird guys, boats, and a uniquely malicious fish.
Reasonable people may differ with me, but I'd argue the greatest writers of fiction & poetry have been apolitical--provided we define "political" as meaning "partisan." I don't think Joyce, Beckett, Faulkner, O'Connor, McCarthy, Stevens, Melville, et al had any use for politics.
[herman Melville writing about chobani]
There is a milky substance, a very singular one, which turns up in the course of this business, but which I feel it to be very puzzling adequately to describe. It is ineffably oozy, stringy, and after a prolonged squeezing, a strange insan
Fast Car is a classic, archetypal text of "cruel optimism." (because its lyrics dramatize damaging/sustaining attachments to the good life but also because everyone wrongly thinks they can sing it.)
It's so important we work together to catch this fish ❤️💪💪🪙🤑🍻
👨👨👦 𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗮𝗱𝗱𝗲𝗱 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝘅𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝗺𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝘄𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝗸𝗻𝗼𝘄
author of this tweet swore vengeance on a brute that simply smote him from blindest instinct
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses; a mini sabbatical or ‘adult gap year’ can be rejuvenating